Rick Barot

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was published by Sarabande Books in 2002. Sarabande published his second book, Want, in 2008; and his third collection, Chord (2015), which won […]

12 years ago

Echo

And what part of his reflection will tell me who I am, that I am standing a little away, wanting in on his story? Days I am cup, slice, gray, need, therapy. The headache of the repetition of his voice, telling himself some story. I am in the city looking for him, forcibly […]

17 years ago

Many Are Called

to burn at least one thing they once owned: she tears the page from his book and sets light to whatever she said to him there, words to smoke, paper to black snow. She would like a sleep as big as a building, whose key she firmly keeps in her hand, its teeth writing […]

17 years ago

West 16th Street

Light glossing on the breakers, then disappearing. You say it is mortal that way: silver, then gone. On the phone, it becomes the distance I listen for, the waves talking just behind you. Here, it is quietly confusing to be at this height, the city’s colors rising to an electric sky, its dense gray […]

17 years ago

Two Video Installations

The elephant in the white room is told to play dead, and she falls to the gray floor, rocking a little before going completely still, only to wake again, rocking again a few times to find momentum and push herself onto a splayed position on the floor, her legs spread like […]

17 years ago

Litany

When any word is called for, say that I am of. When the tornado forms, that is the ruinous kiss. When the bamboo-green field sways, think of tea. When the vines thicken in the heat, this is the medusa head consuming its own stare. When a man commitedly steps to the ledge, this is the […]

17 years ago

Iowa

It is something to be thus saved, a point on which the landscape comes to a deep rest. The ore of a death held frozen, there in the gull so far inland, embedded in the ice at the river’s edge. Its […]

17 years ago

Rick Barot Q&A on the genesis of Two Video Installations

Rick Barot, author of The Darker Fall and Want, talks about the genesis of his poem, Two Video Installations. “Play Dead, Real Time” (2003) by Douglas Gordon. “

17 years ago